Rediscovering Kate Bush

Aerial will reignite your appreciation for her sensual world

Confession time: Until about a month ago, I
hadn’t been listening to much Kate Bush, and I’m not
sure why. True, she hadn’t put out a record in 12 years, and
I tend to listen mostly to new releases, a hazard of the
record-reviewing trade. But a quick inventory of my vinyl racks
proves that I was once an ardent fan: I still own all of her
previous albums except for her seventh, The Red Shoes, which came
out in 1993, apparently the point at which, shame on me, my flame
burned out. Consider it reignited: When I listen to the gorgeous
singing and the you-say-dated-I-say-timeless production and the
general air of doomy ecstasy on Aerial, Bush’s eighth CD, I remember what drew
me to her in the first place. While I’ve been forgetting about her,
she’s been spending the past decade rearing her young son and
partaking of the virtuous pleasures of the English countryside, but
her binary genius remains intact. She’s an English rose
tricked out like Kali, a demon draped in Laura Ashley florals. She
is deeply, disturbingly feminine with her painted-valentine face
and her three-octave range and her sometimes regrettable fondness
for modern dance and goofy costumes. Depending on the demands of
the song, she can sound like a cross between Betty Boop and Maria
Callas, or John Cleese and Emily Brontë, or James Joyce and
Nina Simone. Her songs are often sexually charged — check out
Aerial’s
“Mrs. Bartolozzi,” surely the most suggestive song
about laundry ever written — but she’s escaped the
sex-symbol trap that’s been the ruin of so many of her female
contemporaries. If ever a rock musician approached what the French
feminist-poststructuralist theorist Hélène Cixous
called l’écriture
féminine, it’s Bush;
if ever a rock musician was less deserving of such lit-geek
windbaggery, it’s Bush. Hers is a sensual world, invulnerable to
rhetoric. Let the critics gape at their own dopey metaphors, parse her
allusions, credit her with Fiona Apple, blame her for Tori Amos,
acknowledge her as the reason that the freaky white women of the world
are suffered to bang on pianos and invoke the elements. Whatever dumb
words she coaxes from us, she won’t be bound by them. Aerial actually
comprises two separately titled CDs — A Sea of Honey and aSky of Honey — and
although Bush could have edited out a few seconds here and there to
combine them, they’re different enough to warrant the
expanded packaging. The first disc, Sea, is a collection of character-driven songs, several
of which are strong enough to stand as singles. In
“Bertie,” a mincing Renaissance madrigal replete with
period instruments, Bush sings of her love for her son and somehow
manages to pull off lines such as “You bring me so much
joy/Then you bring me more joy” without sounding like a
Lifetime movie. “Pi,” a song about a man who loves
numbers, boasts a radiant aria composed entirely of decimal places.
In “King of the Mountain,” she celebrates Elvis
Presley, Citizen Kane, and, unless I’m mistaken, King Lear; in
“Joanni,” she takes on Joan of Arc. Sky is more impressionistic,
a conceptual suite or song cycle that follows the course of a
single day in which nothing and everything seems to happen (see Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway).
Birdsong plays against Bush’s coloratura, mimics her stagey
cackle; fretless bass burbles up through a thicket of beats; the
piano chords break like the tide. The sound is numinous,
irreducible, elemental, and, when Bush starts singing, “It
was just so beautiful,” over and over again, you just have to
hear it, because, well, it is.